Free Escape by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page B

though my colleague, Kenny Katz, is co-counsel, and he'll be handling the competency hearing." Karp looked at his watch. "Speaking of which, I have a meeting this morning that I need to get to in ten minutes. I'll see you gentlemen the next time my diet prescribes peach pancakes."
     
    Even though it was only 8 A.M. on a Monday, the sidewalk in front of the Criminal Courts building was already swarming when Karp pulled up in a taxi. At that hour, most of the people out and about were men and women in business attire making their way to the government buildings and the Financial District farther to the south. Some were content to fall in and move at the pace of traffic; others dashed in and out of the stream of pedestrians when they saw openings. But they all walked with single-minded purposefulness, like salmon swimming up a river to spawn.
    Karp noted dour expressions and vacant looks. Mondays were never the best day for Joe Blow office-worker; however, today their expressions were a bit tighter than usual. People seemed more lost than usual in their own concerns. They've been struck again in the gut by the madness of terrorism, Karp thought, grabbing a copy of the New York Times from the newsstand in front of the courts building.
    At the top in bold, 72-point type, the paper blared: "WHO WAS HE?" The subhead complained that the feds were still withholding the identification of the suicide bomber—if they had it—under provisions of the Patriot Act, which these days seemed to override the rights of a free press.
    No one knew how long the secret would be kept. Karp had heard over the weekend from Ariadne Stupenagel, the investigative reporter who was shacking up with his aide-de-camp, Gilbert Murrow, that the Times, as well as the rest of the media—including the New York Guardian, the weekly she was currently working for—intended to go to U.S. District Court to force the government to release the bomber's name, or, if they did not have it, to at least admit that fact. She'd also learned that they would be joined in court by U.S. Senator Tom McCullum, a tough-talking politician from Montana who'd been the chief critic on Capitol Hill of overreaching actions by federal law-enforcement agencies using the Patriot Act as their carte blanche to "spy on U.S. citizens."
    Karp noted that the main story wrapped around a sidebar report on eyewitness accounts from the bombing site. Several described the bomber as a black man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in a long dark coat.
    "I saw the guy outside," Lydia Sheffield, a twenty-two-year-old cosmetology student, was quoted as saying. She had walked past the synagogue with her boyfriend a few minutes before the blast. "He gave me the creeps," she added.
    Other accounts described the horror of a man blowing himself up, along with an innocent rabbi, and sending the blast, along with thousands of steel ball bearings, through men who'd gathered peacefully to pray.
     
    Over the years, Karp had witnessed the aftereffects of dozens of heinous crimes—the viciousness of sadistic serial killers, the gut-wrenching horror caused by child killers, the senseless deeds of men and women armed with shotguns and knives, and even the gory aftermath of bombings. But he'd been stunned by the carnage at the synagogue that day.
    Within minutes of Fulton announcing "it finally happened," the two of them were in the DAO's armored Lincoln with a blue flashing light on top heading north on Third Avenue. By the time they arrived, the block had already been cordoned off by the cops while bomb-sniffing dogs circulated in the gathering crowd as well as inside the police perimeter.
    Looking up as he got out of the car, Karp saw police snipers on rooftops scanning the spectators from open windows of nearby buildings. He recalled what a speaker had once told the Five Boroughs Anti-Terrorism Task Force: that unlike lightning, terrorists often struck the same place twice. The purpose of the second